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Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home--A Memoir
Free Press
May 2008
On Sale: May 13, 2008
320 pages
ISBN: 1416547665
EAN: 9781416547662
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Pig Candy is the poignant and often comical story of a
grown daughter getting to know her dying father in his last
months. During a series of visits with her father to the
South he'd escaped as a young black man, Lise Funderburg,
the mixed-race author of the acclaimed Black, White, Other,
comes to understand his rich and difficult background and
the conflicting choices he has had to make throughout his
life.
Lise Funderburg is a child of the '60s, a white-looking
mixed-race girl raised in an integrated Philadelphia
neighborhood. As a child, she couldn't imagine what had
made her father so strict, demanding, and elusive; about
his past she knew only that he had grown up in the Jim Crow
South and fled its brutal oppression as a young man. Then,
just as she hits her forties, her father is diagnosed with
advanced and terminal cancer -- an event that leads father
and daughter together on a stream of pilgrimages to his
hometown in rural Jasper County, Georgia. As her father's
escort, proxy, and, finally, nurse, Funderburg encounters
for the first time the fragrant landscape and fraught
society -- and the extraordinary food -- of his childhood. In succulent, evocative, and sometimes tart prose, the
author brings to life a fading rural South of pecan groves,
family-run farms, and pork-laden country cuisine. She
chronicles small-town relationships that span generations,
the dismantling of her own assumptions about when race does
and doesn't matter, and the quiet segregation that persists
to this day. As Funderburg discovers the place and people
her father comes from, she also, finally, gets to know her
magnetic, idiosyncratic father himself. Her account of
their thorny but increasingly close relationship is full of
warmth, humor, and disarming candor. In one of his last
grand actsFunderburg's father recruits his children,
neighbors, and friends to throw a pig roast -- an
unforgettable meal that caps an unforgettable portrait of a
man enjoying his life and loved ones right up through his
final days. Pig Candy takes readers on a stunning journey that becomes
a universal investigation of identity and a celebration of
the human will, familial love, and, ultimately, life
itself.
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